This week there are seven webinars being run, and I’ve taken the opportunity to recommend three on topics that are very different from each other while all still providing access to compelling thought leadership. Click on the title of each event below to view the full description in our events calendar and connect to their registration pages.

We’ve all heard the saying, “Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.” Choosing to dual source a category means using two (or more) suppliers to provide identical copies of a product or service. Many companies choose to dual source a product to maintain quality levels of service to their customers and mitigate potential supply chain issues.

Supply chains are similar to humans—imperfect. Their successes within business plans are a product of accurately forecasting how to survive crises and minimize damage in high-risk scenarios. Balance is the key to surviving most situations. In a supply chain, the accord between supply chain efficiency and risk mitigation can be difficult to achieve.

Mother Nature has shown her fury with the 7 feet of snow that has fallen on Buffalo, NY this past week. It is an epic storm that just kept dumping snow on the region. At one point there was 130 miles of highway shutdown for several days. There were tractor trailers stranded and many deliveries that did not occur. You can bet that many supply chains were impacted. Even when the roads did open up again, it was for essential vehicles only. Something tells me that your shipment was probably not considered essential to the National Guard.

This week’s webinar notes are from a July 31st event hosted by ISM and presented by LexisNexis. The event is available on demand on ISM’s site. If you are interested in more on the topic, LexisNexis has made available a white paper and accompanying infographic titled “Leveraging Market Intelligence to Better Manage Supply Chain Risk.

The presenter, Eric Walsworth, LexisNexis’ Director of Supply Management, illustrated each of his points about risk management by drawing comparisons to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. I won’t embarrass myself by trying to recreate any of that – if you’re interested in the soccer angle you’ll have to watch the webinar on demand.

Walsworth took a need – risk management - that is overwhelming for many procurement teams and broke it down into very clear phases and efforts. Although each of these elements is important to a supply risk management effort, they must all work together in order to be effective. Additionally, although the following seem to be a linear process, they must all be executed in parallel.

Supply Chain Risk, by John Manners-Bell, provides a structured look at risk by establishing a series of intersecting dimensions. First the author outlines external risk categories: Environmental, Economic, Societal, Security, and Technological. Each has several sub categories that provide additional detail and clarity. Then he delves into a number of industry sectors to consider their resiliency factors and concerns: Automotive, High tech, Consumer goods/retail, Food, Fashion, and Pharma/healthcare.

The coverage from both perspectives is equally detailed and illustrated with numerous case studies. In their intersection, for instance where Economic risks intersect with the Automotive industry, any supply chain professional will find the information they need to quickly come up to speed on key areas of concern as well as strategies for assessment and mitigation.

Editor's note: Buyers Meeting Point would like to thank partner and colleague Jeanette Jones of Cottrill Research for this week's webinar notes. The original posting can be viewed on the Cottrill blog. For our readers without a background in etymology or taxonomies, an ontology is the study of categories of bring as well as their interrelations. In a procurement context, this can most clearly be seen in spend analysis through the category structure and hierarchy used by the company to group and organize transactions.

There are many articles and reports about using Big Data for supplier risk, but there is still confusion about what Big Data is and how exactly one moves forward. Tom Fishburne at marketcartoonist.com succinctly sums it up with this gem, “many companies struggle with small data, let alone big data.”

This week’s featured webinar notes are from a February 6th webinar hosted by Preparis. The event is available on demand on their website. The event was fascinating, in no small part because of the qualifications of the speakers and the organizations they represent.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the first day of Spring was 3/21. Sometimes that day feels like everything is waking up and beginning to grow. Other years, there is still snow on the ground and quite chilly.

Buyers Meeting Point would like to thank Stephen Ashcroft and the team at Procurisk for sharing what they learned at this week's Sustainability and Risk round table. For more details please contact Stephen Ashcroft directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., on Twitter @ProcureChange or by calling 01744 20698. In addition, the Sustainability and Risk in Procurement group on Linkedin is accepting members.

Last week I attended an excellent supply chain risk management webinar sponsored by the Next Level Purchasing Association and featuring a global supply chain manager from a Fortune 500 company. The event followed the story of this particular corporate supply chain through the 2010 tsunami in Japan (you can click here for my notes).

One of the lessons this particular company learned was about finding the right place for addressing the human side of a very complicated business issue. I was impressed with the efforts they had made, particularly for such a large company. A thought started to form in my mind: what contract clauses were put aside in order to have an appropriate response to the devastation while not creating serious business continuity issues?

Before I even begin my notes, let me just point out that if you are not a member of the Next Level Purchasing Association, you are missing out. Next Level Purchasing offers the SPSM (Senior Professional in Supply Management) certification program. Joining the association is absolutely free and comes with a number of benefits, such as members-only webinars, newsletters, and networking opportunities. If you want to get your feet wet with the kind of programs they offer, there are several mini-courses they offer, completely online and for less than $20! Interested? Good for you! Click here to learn more by clicking on the NLP logo on our partner page. That way Buyers Meeting Point gets credit for your purchase and a portion of the proceeds go to charity.

This week's Wiki-Wednesday topic is an excerpt from th Wikipedi page on Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician that taught post WWII Japan to manage quality, but wasn't discovered in the U.S. until the very end of his career. Not many business strategies would survive that kind of test of time, but his does.

I was really looking forward to this event, and it did not disappoint. This is the first event I have attended by Preparis (providers of an emergency preparedness suite) and I will add them to my list of sources for future webinars. Kudos to Bill Michaels (CEO, ADR North America), David Landsman (Director of Strategic Alliances, MFG.com) and Armistead Whitney (CEO, Preparis) for an exceptionally well done event. You can click here to listen to the event archive.